ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 10 Bilingual Lexical Processing in Single Word Production Swedish learners of Spanish and the effects of L2 immersion Ulrika Serrander Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Ihresalen, Humanististiskt centrum. Engelska parken. Uppsala universitet, Uppsala, Friday, March 4, 2011 at 13:00 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Abstract Serrander, U. 2011. Bilingual lexical processing in single word production. Swedish learners of Spanish and the effects of L2 immersion. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 10. 144 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-554-7990-9. Bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their dominant language while naming pictures in a foreign and less dominant language. Previous research has revealed that this cross-language activation is manifested through phonological facilitation, semantic interference and between language competition. This research is based exclusively on highly proficient bilinguals. The present study investigates cross-linguistic activation in Swedish learners of Spanish, grouped according to their length of Spanish immersion, and one of the groups is in its very initial stages of acquisition. Participants named pictures in Spanish in two picture-word interference experiments, one with only non-cognates, and one including cognates. The study addresses the following research questions; (1) do the two groups of participants differ significantly from one another in terms of cross-linguistic activation, (2) what does cross-language activation look like in initial stages of L2 acquisition, (3) how does cognate status affect cross-linguistic activation and does this differ between participants depending on their length of immersion? The experiments show that cross-linguistic influence is dependent on length of immersion. The more immersed participants performed very similarly to what is usually the case in highly proficient bilinguals while the less immersed participants did not. The results of the less immersed participants are interpreted as manifestations of lexical processing in initial stages of L2 acquisition. Since this type of learner has never been tested within the picture-word- interference paradigm before, there are no previous online results to compare to. The results are discussed in relation to the large tradition of offline research which has shown that beginning learners predominantly process their L2 phonologically, and that conceptual processing is something requiring more L2 development. These findings are discussed in terms of a developmental ladder of L2 processing stages. Furthermore, the cognate word induced longer naming latencies in all participants and it turned out that the cognate words were highly unfamiliar. Hence all participants are sensitive to word-frequency effects, and this sensitive is greater in early stages of learning. Finally this study suggests that more research must be conducted to establish cross-linguistic influence between the many languages of multi-lingual subjects, even when these languages may not be present in the testing situation. Keywords: Bilingualism, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, the bilingual lexicon, bilingual lexical processing, bilingual lexical access, word-frequency effect, cognate effect, picture-word interference. Ulrika Serrander, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Box 256, Uppsala University, SE-75105 Uppsala, Sweden. © Ulrika Serrander 2011 ISSN 1652-1366 ISBN 978-91-554-7990-9 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-143614 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-143614) Printed in Sweden by Edita Västra Aros, a climate neutral company, Västerås 2011. Contents Acknowledgment ............................................................................................7 1 Introduction..................................................................................................9 1.1 The present study ...............................................................................10 1.2 Research questions .............................................................................11 1.3 Structure of the thesis.........................................................................12 2 Theoretical perspectives.............................................................................14 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................14 2.2 Cross-linguistic influence...................................................................14 2.2.1 Psychotypology and the “foreign language effect” ....................15 2.2.2 Proficiency..................................................................................16 2.2.3 L2 status......................................................................................17 2.2.4 Mode...........................................................................................17 2.2.5 Recency ......................................................................................17 2. 3 Notions of language development.....................................................18 2.3.1 Proficiency and Age ...................................................................18 2.3.2 Automaticity ...............................................................................19 2.3.3 Effects of study-abroad learning contexts ..................................20 2.3.4 The processing of form and meaning .........................................21 2.4 General architecture of the bilingual mental lexicon and L2 lexical processes ..................................................................................................23 2.4.1 Introduction ................................................................................23 2.4.2 Spreading activation and lexical access......................................23 2.4.3 Bilingual memory organization; - Language independent or language specific?................................................................................25 2.4.4 Word-type effects - cognate status and word frequency.............27 2.5 How to study the bilingual mental lexicon.........................................29 2.5.1 Introduction ................................................................................29 2.5.2 The picture-word interference paradigm ....................................29 2.5.3 Limitations of the picture-word interference paradigm..............30 2.6 Summary ............................................................................................32 3 Outline of the present study .......................................................................33 3.1 Terminology.......................................................................................33 3.2 Participants.........................................................................................34 3.2.1 Bilingual participants..................................................................34 3.2.2 Swedish comparison group.........................................................41 3.3 The experimental task design.............................................................41 3.4 Experimental material ........................................................................47 3.5 Apparatus ...........................................................................................51 3.6 Procedure............................................................................................51 4 Experiment 1, non-cognates.......................................................................53 4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................53 4.2 Participants.........................................................................................53 4.3 Materials.............................................................................................53 4.4 Procedure............................................................................................54 4.5 Design and analysis............................................................................54 4.6 Results ................................................................................................55 4.6.1 Results of the bilingual participants, grouped according to length of Spanish immersion ...............................................................55 4.6.2 Swedish comparison group.........................................................73 4.7 Summary of results and discussion, Experiment 1.............................77 5 Experiment 2, cognates and non-cognates mixed......................................81 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................81 5.2 Participants.........................................................................................81 5.3 Materials.............................................................................................81 5.4 Procedure............................................................................................82 5.5 Design and analysis............................................................................83 5.6 Results, Experiment 2 ........................................................................84 5.6.1 Bilingual participants grouped by length of Spanish immersion .....84 5.6.2 Results, Swedish comparison group .........................................102 5.7 Summary of results and discussion,